Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed network technology and protocol suite used to implement storage area networks (SANs). A purpose of the FC protocol suite is to efficiently manage large numbers of storage devices using serial interfaces operating over optical or electrical interfaces. FC provides an efficient and dependable means for transferring data between workstations, mainframes, supercomputers, desktop computers, and storage devices.
Recent developments have extended Fibre Channel to Ethernet. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a protocol that leverages Ethernet extensions to enable the establishment of lossless connections between two Ethernet nodes. The FCoE protocol uses such lossless connections. More specifically, native FC frames are encapsulated in Ethernet frames such that Ethernet becomes the physical interface and FC becomes the transport protocol. At an Ethernet receiving node, the native FC frames are de-encapsulated from the Ethernet frames and then processed in accordance with the FC protocol. By deploying the lossless capability in Ethernet, FC can be extended to Ethernet-capable network devices; thereby increasing the reach of FC connected devices. As such, FC networks may use native FC or FCoE as the underlying transport protocol.
SANs are used to connect host devices (e.g., servers, computers, etc.) to one or more shared storage devices. The network part of a SAN based on Fibre Channel is called an FC switched fabric. An FC fabric comprises one or more FC switches that are deployed to direct traffic between the host devices and the storage devices. The host devices perform computations and/or provide services, usually through a network connection to a wide area network (WAN) (e.g., the Internet, Intranet, etc.) or a local area network (LAN).